The iPad Mini
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Page 17

mcmonkeyplc wrote:
Any suggestions on how to prevent this? What are the best reading practices on these devices?

A Kindle is what you should be using to read books (or walk into Waterstones and you know, buy a book!) ... but the iPad mini is not great for reading for long periods of time, hence the quite-rightly moaning at the resolution.

Think there is something out there to make the text on websites look bigger and a tiny little bit clearer; not sure where though, sorry.

Increase font size in Safari temporarily (resets on refresh). It's only Safari where I find text a problem, in everything else you can default bigger (Mail, Kindle, Alien Blue, Reeder, Instapaper etc) so text looks fine, just not spectacular like on 3rd gen and beyond.

Where poss, I use the Reader function in Safari quite a bit on the mini.

It's basically because you're staring at a screen.
That's mitigated slightly by the Retina stuff, but, essentially, you're staring at a light and getting the same old problems as with too much gaming or TV.

I'd suggest white text on black for a start, and then, especially if you're reading at night, turn down the brightness a fair bit.

I've got a Kindle (touch) and, yes, it's great for long periods- it really does look like you're reading off of paper, but I suspect it'll hardly get used now I've loaded the Kindle app on the ipad. The reading bit is second to none (in daylight) but the OS feels so incredibly clunky and slow, it drives me nuts now.

Well I've only really started to notice over the past 2 days that it's giving me a headache when reading on the kindle app.

I use white on black most of the time but it's probably telling that yesterday I used sepia for a change and got a headache. Today I switched back to white on black and I was just feeling a little tired. I increased the font size as well.

I agree with THfourteen though, I can see me doing without my GS3 with this. I obviously need the phone for tethering but that could be some cheapo Nokia

One thing I'm fidning frustrating- I don't know if I'm missing a trick. The keyboard is all uppercase. Um, even when I'm typing in lowercase. The only indication that you're about to type a capital letter is the highlighted shift key.
Why no upper and lowercase letters? It seems so basic.

And, I love the split keyboard feature- feels really quick to type on. But it seems to get in the way all the time given that it's set to float midway on the screen... often it obscuring the box I'm trying to type into which is poop. Is there no way to split it and have it docked at the bottom?

Just pull the keyboard apart with your thumbs while its at the bottom of the screen, it'll stay there.

Re: always uppercase, no option to change it I'm afraid. What do you think this is, android?!

As for text size, I've been giving Mercury browser a go as it saves the font size you use on a site. I kinda miss the Safari icloud stuff, but browsing is better on the mini when you don't have to increase size after every refresh.

Ideally Safari would have the option for larger text, but don't you get the feeling Apple's pettiness/arrogance means it'll never happen as it'd be an admission that text at that res/physical size isn't ideal?

Kind of like the lack of wifi/bluetooth toggles. It's understandable in the sense there's no widgets officially, but there's the suggestion Apple are never likely to offer the facility (even if iOS7 brought widgets) as they want to promote idevices as things which require minimal access or fiddling with settings. In theory, NFC or similar could bring automated settings changes like already exist on certain Android phones. In the meantime, why the fuck we can't have toggles in Notification Centre is beyond me. NCSettings, via jailbreak, was simple and elegant at doing just that. That, and Zephyr are the jb tweaks I miss the most (I'm talking really about iPhone jailbreak, not arsed about jbing iPads, I don't change the settings much with it and it already has swipe up for multitasking bar)

So, thoughts? I'm looking at an iPad for work due to the obscene amount of reeding and travelling I need to do (paperless office but I can't get used to sitting at a desk for all my reading). They are offering to buy me a laptop but I'm minded to just buy my own iPad instead. Put off slightly by low res (even if it will mean little in practice), but I'm more concerned by the effect this will have on apps (evernote and the like I use for work).

For some reason I now have one of these iPads. I think I'll be keeping it. I thought the resolution would bother me more. The real test will be Baldur's Gate tonight. I'm not sure how playable it'll be.

Baldur's Gate works great now, I found it unplayable before the patch. Had no real issues except the ones that were always there, like the Bleeding party never actually going where I want them to. Sometimes seems to be a memory problem though after you die and reload, just close the programs and restart it. Does mean that I end up longing for Baldur's Gate 2 and Planescape that much more though.

Reason I'm lurking on here is my mrs loves the Ipad, so was going to get her the mini for her birthday, but not sure if I should wait for the Mini 2. Apple seems worse then PC's used to be for endless updating.

So my iPads screen is scratched and fragmenting slowly. Do I buy a mini, or save and buy another pad? Essentially to those who have had both: is there anything you wish you had the iPad's size for when using the mini?

Oh, it runs mostly fine post-patch. I was playing on my iPad 1 until yesterday and while it's rough around the edges technically, or rather control-wise, my doubt was related to the screen size versus my sausage fingers on the mini, not anything else.

I've since decided it's perfectly fine, so I have no more reservations about replacing the iPad 1 with the mini.